The regional election in Hessen, held at the end of October, saw the seemingly impossible – the beginning of the end of Angela Merkel. Following her party’s poor performance, she made a two-fold announcement. On the one hand, she would not be running for re-election at her annual party congress in December, where the Christian-Democrats… Continue Reading ➤

“The election [on Sunday 14th of October]”, writes the Süddeutsche Zeitung, “was a typical Bavarian revolution. Fireworks, a lot of smoke [and] dreams in Schwabing [a central Munich district in which the Greens obtained 34% of the votes] which, throughout the night, felt like they could become true. The morning after, the Alps are still… Continue Reading ➤

It took five months, the failure of a “Jamaica” coalition and the threat of new elections, but, as of earlier this month, Germany finally has a government. However, the announcement that Angela Merkel’s CDU (as well as the CSU, its Bavarian sister party) have reached yet another coalition agreement with the social-democratic SPD seems to… Continue Reading ➤

Author

Guillermo Íñiguez

Featured Posts

The first step in any recovery programme is admitting there is a problem. Aceh, Indonesia’s northern, gas rich, conservative province, however, has struggled to do so. Ironically, these problems were caused by the very solutions created in the aftermath of the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004 to address the three decades of separatist conflict and… Continue Reading ➤

The Conservative’s Help to Buy scheme was their flagship policy for addressing rapidly rising prices caused by the acute housing bubble in the UK. Since it’s implementation in 2015, the government reported in 2017 that more than 100,000 homes across England had been bought under the scheme, with as much as 81% of this figure… Continue Reading ➤

Brexit is just one of the many destabilising influences that face an increasingly precarious system of European cooperation. In fact, the haste with which the EU wishes to reach an agreement with Britain is largely driven by the need for Europeans to concentrate on more existential threats. Issues such as rising discontent over the migrant… Continue Reading ➤

The current 2016 USA presidential election cycle is set to be the most exciting in living memory. Outsiders have hijacked the primary races of both major parties in stunning fashion. While Donald Trump does what he does best, stealing the spotlight with insidious pandering, his left-wing counterpart is quietly rocking established dogma. Winning 6 of… Continue Reading ➤

It was late one August evening and Parliament had voted to declare war on its own integrity. In refusing to come to the aid of the Syrian people, Britain became a nation of apathy, isolationism and cowardice, unwilling to stand for the principles of international law, the cries of Arabic suffering unintelligible to English ears…. Continue Reading ➤

One year on, and we still keep hearing about the Russian annexation of Crimea. Doubtless the situation in Eastern Ukraine has continued to add fuel to the fire and keep the story in the press, but the media still concentrates a lot on the situation in the peninsula. Illegal as it may have been, however, there… Continue Reading ➤

In mid-January, I had the honour of receiving an invitation from Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge to report on the ‘Women of Achievement’ lecture series organised in celebration of the College’s 50th anniversary. Once or twice a week, students, members of faculty, and guests all gathered in the Wood-Legh Room of Strathaird House – a beautifully… Continue Reading ➤

Received wisdom tells us that small business is important. Political parties representing all shades of opinion clamber to show that they are the ones who have the interests of small businesses at heart, even if they have more mixed opinions of large corporations. The Conservatives describe small business as the “lifeblood of our economy”; Labour promise… Continue Reading ➤